Director, Partner Manager, Enterprise, EMEA

Circle (NYSE: CRCL) is one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure. Circle’s platform includes the world’s largest regulated stablecoin network anchored by USDC, Circle Payments Network for global money movement, and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet. Enterprises, financial institutions, and developers use Circle to power trusted, internet-scale financial innovation.

Circle is building its enterprise business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Your role will be to design and execute a strategy to help our partners implement, launch and grow their stablecoin strategy. As Director of Partner Management for Enterprise EMEA, you are the owner of the relationship, from partnership design to launch, adoption and commercial growth. Your portfolio is 10 to 15 strategic partnerships: household-name corporations, and the platforms and institutions that serve them, from the Nordics and DACH to the Gulf and Sub-Saharan Africa.

You will join a small, senior regional team of four covering business development, partner management and solution engineering. Business Development sources and closes. You take over at signature and carry the relationship through implementation, enablement and launch, adoption and expansion. Solution Engineering owns the technical build; you own the plan, the dates, the escalations and the outcome. This is an individual contributor role to start, with the expectation that you establish and scale the partner management function as the segment grows. You will have executive sponsorship, a clear mandate and room to set the standard. You will not inherit a finished process, and for the right person that is the appeal rather than the risk.

Responsibilities

• Work with Business Development and Solution Engineering before signature to shape deliverable commitments, agree success measures and establish a joint execution plan. Use data-driven tools and AI-enabled synthesis to align stakeholders and produce clear, actionable plans.
• Lead the relationship through plan, implementation, launch and expansion after the partnership signature by the Business Developer.
• Own each partnership from contract signature as the partner’s primary contact at Circle, accountable for time to value and for the go-live dates you agreed.
• Build and run a joint plan for every partnership: the commercial thesis, products and markets in scope, measurable outcomes, named owners on both sides, dated milestones. Review it on a fixed cadence that opens with the baseline and the gap, and closes with one owner and one date per action. Leverage automation and AI-assisted reporting to keep the plan current and visible.
• Carry the partner’s blockers to Product, Legal, Compliance, Risk and Operations, and come back with an answer rather than a status.
• Own the work that turns an integrated partner into a transacting one. Train the people who use the product day to day, not only the executive sponsor, until partner-facing teams can represent Circle without us in the room. Use modern enablement approaches — including AI-accelerated learning aids, playbooks and just-in-time training — to scale knowledge transfer.
• Clear the operational, policy and approval dependencies that sit between a signed agreement and real usage. Use tooling and workflow automation to reduce time to value.
• Expand each partnership step by step into further products, currencies, markets and entities, and structure agreements so that growth does not mean reopening them.
• Create expansion and monetization opportunities, which drive value to live partners and work them to close with Business Development.
• Know what each partner is worth to Circle and how much of their business is still available to us, and feed that back to Product, Marketing and regional leadership in a form they can act on. Apply analytical models and AI-enabled forecasting to surface opportunities and risk.
• Define the post-signature lifecycle, its stages and its gates, and make it the way the segment operates rather than a document it refers to.
• Set reliable baselines and reporting for the portfolio, then own the targets built on them. Automate reporting where appropriate and use AI-enabled analytics to maintain accuracy and surface insights.
• Codify what works into a model that scales beyond the partnerships you personally manage.
• Build a mechanism to facilitate data-driven portfolio prioritization, partner-health assessment and recovery plans.

Requirements

• 12+ years managing enterprise partnerships or strategic accounts across the full lifecycle: implementation, adoption, expansion and renewal.
• A record of turning signed agreements into live, growing usage, with the numbers to show it: time to launch, adoption against plan, growth within the account, additional revenue generated by upsell opportunities.
• Deep experience in complex, matrixed organizations, with credibility in the boardroom and with operational teams.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional execution across Product, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Marketing and Operations without formal authority over any of them.
• Strong commercial and analytical judgment. You measure what you own, keep one source of truth, and bring a number to every conversation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including material built for executive audiences.
• Fluency with AI-enabled productivity and automation tools (e.g., large language model interfaces, workflow automation, knowledge retrieval) to synthesize partner data, accelerate reporting, build playbooks, and improve go-to-market speed. Familiarity with core AI/ML concepts and the ability to evaluate AI-driven features in product and provide practical feedback.
• Nice to have: Background in treasury, payments, financial services, enterprise software or digital assets, with practical fluency of how large organizations move money across borders.
• Nice to have: Experience building early-stage programs or partnerships where the process did not exist yet.
• Nice to have: Familiarity with digital asset regulation across EMEA: MiCA in the European Union, and the frameworks developing in the Gulf and across Africa.
• Nice to have: Experience across the breadth of EMEA and the cultural fluency that requires. Business-level English required; German, French or Arabic an advantage.
• Nice to have: Ownership mindset, bias for action, attention to detail, and readiness to travel roughly 30% of the time for partner reviews, launches and industry events.

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